Don't Let Your Desk Kill You: A GQ Get-off-Your-Ass Primer

In theory, I shouldn't have this problem. As a self-employed writer with no set hours or boss to answer to, I should be moving around plenty. But it turns out I'm not. For the past year, I've been writing a book, and my schedule has been much closer to the one America's office workers live by. Most days I rise, eat, take the subway a few stops, walk a couple of blocks, and sit at a desk for eight to ten hours. The only thing that might be exceptional about my case is that I am borderline compulsive about drinking water, so I probably make more trips to the bathroom than the average guy.

This is actually a great (accidental) strategy, according to Catrine Tudor-Locke, director of the Walking Behavior Laboratory at Pennington.
Tudor-Locke is one of the world's foremost evangelists for walking, and it was inevitable that I would arrive at her office to find her at a "walking desk"—basically a desk mated to a treadmill. Tudor-Locke's is a fancy ($6,000) Steelcase model, but she said that a co-worker built his own using a cheap treadmill and some Target shelving.

The most active offices

Timberland• A soccer field, Zumba classes, canoes and kayaks upon request—Timberland's campus is like a fitness lab where work occasionally gets done. "We're an outdoors company, and our employees are sort of hardwired to get moving," says CEO Jeff Swartz.

SAS• Software CEO Jim Goodnight sounds vaguely Orwellian when explaining his company's investment in a 66,000-square-
foot fitness facility: "We know our employees are more productive and creative when they're healthy, energized, and feel good." Well, no one here
is complaining: 96 percent of SAS employees use the jumbo gym.

New Belgium Brewery• After a year at New Belgium, every employee is given a cruiser bike to explore the fifty-acre campus's dirt tracks. "Some of our best ideas happen on rides," says CEO Kim Jordan. For
the other big breakthroughs, check over at the climbing wall.—Rafi Kohan

Tudor-Locke stepped down and told me to give the desk a try. "It starts at about 0.3 miles an hour," she said. "Now take it up to one mile an hour and see how that feels. Then go ahead and type. Now take it up to two, which is where my world is." I typed some lines; it was no harder than if I were sitting. "You can type without looking," she said. "That's good." People who have to look at the keyboard have trouble. In total, Tudor-Locke walks about three hours—which at two miles per hour means that she walks six miles a day. With help from an in-house exercise lab, she found that she burns about 2,000 calories more per week than she would have sitting in her chair.

As a walking specialist, Tudor-Locke believes the metric that matters most is total steps taken. When she added the walking desk to an already active lifestyle ("like, scary active"), she was peaking at more than 28,000 steps a day. In comparison, she said, office workers are probably under 5,000, with the most sedentary among us in the realm of 3,500. These were just guesses, she said, because the whole area of study is very new. The truth could be worse.
(When I strapped on a pedometer, the results were depressing: On days when I drove to my office, I averaged about 3,000 steps; when I took the train, it jumped to 4,000 a day.)

I asked if Tudor-Locke had a chair I might pull up to continue our interview, and she gave me a look as if I'd just suggested we take golf carts next door for stuffed-crust pizza. Instead, she led me into the swampy afternoon, where she set a swift pace as we conducted a "walking meeting," a favorite conceit of hers.

Americans, Tudor-Locke said, are the world leaders in not walking. By looking at a national study of Americans who wore pedometers with accelerometers—which show cadences—Tudor-Locke could tell how much time people spend walking, running, sitting, or "puttering around." In many cases, she said, "it is very clear that the individual's highest single minute in the morning is when he's walking from his car to the office." The next spike, then, is "at the end of the day when he walks from his office to the car." This pattern appears "again and again."

Tudor-Locke and Church suspect the minimum steps we should take a day is in the neighborhood of 8,000. For the guy who's strolling only to and from his car, that's a lot of extra walking: One hundred steps a minute (a reasonable pace) is 1,000 in ten minutes, so to get to 8,000 from 3,000 you're talking fifty more minutes of walking. Even I don't drink that much water.

Not surprisingly, evidence shows that individuals who are more active—again, think Amish—have a lower risk of heart disease and diabetes. (One recent study even connected prolonged sitting to colorectal cancer.) And scientists are looking beyond just walking to measure something called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (or NEAT)—the energy expended during daily living. As Church told me, "Don't underestimate the benefits of low-intensity activity."

"It's just fundamental thermodynamics—energy in and energy out," Tudor-Locke said as we went indoors for our cooldown laps. "I'm not going to advocate that we go back to banging our clothing on rocks. I like my washing machine. But there is such a thing as excessive sloth." After four laps, Tudor-Locke finally stopped walking.

"It's one of those things I never get tired of saying: Just walk more."

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Talk about setting the bar low. All that's required of us, to save ourselves from an expanding paunch brought on by excessive e-mailing, is to get up and move. And our waistlines aren't the only thing to worry about. "Just as weight has gone up, flexibility, functional strength, and muscle mass have likely decreased over the last five decades with the loss of active jobs," Church says. This means that even if sitting doesn't give you heart disease, it will most likely foil any fantasies you may have of a twilight inspired by Cocoon. You see, while modern medicine is doing a good job of phasing out premature death, "it cannot assure a high quality of life." According to Church, we lose 1 percent of muscle mass per year starting sometime in our forties or fifties, and the loss of physically active jobs likely accelerates this. "If you do not have enough strength to chase your grandchildren or lift yourself off the toilet," he says, "then your quality of life will not be great."

And those are just the physical ramifications. It seems obvious that all these inactive days in climate-controlled rooms are bumming us out as well. The satisfaction of completing a market analysis can hardly compare to the feeling of finishing up a house foundation. Church says that looking at how mental well-being correlates to your activity at work is one of many related studies he'd like to do, given the time (and funding); existing research shows that physical activity relieves depression. "I jokingly say that the strongest benefits of physical activity are above the shoulders," he told me. "You just feel good when you go cut wood; I mean, you really do. Mow the damn lawn! You'll feel better afterward."

Josh Dean recently logged 18,564 steps while walking his son to sleep.